Damien Cisneros-Coronado

Period 2 sports medicine

Mrs. Walters

March 1, 2019

What is CTE? As many of us don’t know or never heard what CTE is. The Boston University

CTE center has described CTE as a disease that doesn’t always show up right away after head

contact. CTE is a Brain disease found in athletes, military veterans, and others with a history of

repetitive brain trauma. CTE is a protein called Tau forms clamps that slowly spread through the

brain, killing brain cells. It has been seen in as people such age 17. Symptoms don’t normally

show up until years after physical head contact. The most common age where CTE can be found

in are people who range between the ages of 20s-30s. It can affect a person’s mood and behavior

such as impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and paranoia. As soon as the disease

progresses into the other stages of its terrible disease some patients experience problems like:

memory or thinking loss, confusion, Impaired judgment, and eventually progressive dementia.

These appear later than mood and behavior symptoms and occur at age of 40s-50s. These

symptoms worsen with time so the older you get the more of these symptoms appear and the

worst you get with symptoms even of the patient suffers no additional head impacts. In other

cases, symptoms may be stable for years before worsening. The sports that get most CTE cases

are boxers, tackle football, soccer players, ice hockey, military veterans, and victims of domestic

abuse. Not everyone who suffered multiple hits to the head has gotten CTE but then the chances
are high if you had. The causes of CTE are repetitive hits to the head sustained over a period of

years. Athletes with long careers of playing contact sports are at greater risk of getting CTE then

athlete with short careers of playing contact sports.

The science of CTE was first described in 1928, when Dr. Harrison Martland described a ground

of boxers as having “ punch drunk syndrome”. Over the next 75 years several researchers

reported similar findings in the “ punch drunk syndrome”. The neurons are the basic building

blocks of the brains and over 90 billions neurons allow us to interpret and reactor our

environment. Every neuron has three mains parts: the cell body, the axon, and the axon terminal.

The most important part of the cell body is the axon. The axon is like a long skinny structure that

works a lot like a wire in a electrical circuit. If the electrical circuit is disturb things don’t work

property and the signal doesn’t get to the place it needs to get. The same thing with a axon if it is

intervened the systems breaks down and it doesn’t work as it should be working. When is is

damages it is difficult for the cells to distribute chemicals and materials to all areas of the cell. It

has trouble sending signals and interfering with the brain's ability to do its job. Once it has been

interferes with it messes up the current that everything has and one by one everything starts to

fall apart. In diseased Brian’s the same protein that helped keep everything together dam actually

cause things to apart. If the microtubes breaks down, Tau por tienda can float freely inside the

cell. Under these conditions it changes their shape causing them to clump together. Once they

clumps begin to for they can spread to surroundings Brain areas. At a certain point, the clumps

take on a life of their own, and continue to grow and spread even without additional head

impacts through a process known as prion spread.